


Dreams of Places

by Silex



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Haunted Houses, Trick or Treat: Treat, how stories grow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 17:39:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16179974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: The house was haunted, everyone on the street knew it.





	Dreams of Places

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



There was no grand story to why it had ended up the way it had. No curses, murders or general ill omens in its past. The house was simply a house and it was known to be haunted.

The story started that the first owner had died mysteriously.

She hadn’t.

The old woman, typically referred to as Esther Wilson in the stories, had simply died alone during the winter.

Esther wasn’t even her real name, it was Wilma Miller.

There _had_ been a Wilson family that _had_ lived on the same street, but they moved away well before that point in time, when their youngest boy got in some trouble with the law.

Wilma had died quietly in her sleep and was found the day after when the milkman noticed that she hadn’t picked up the previous day’s delivery.

She didn’t remain undiscovered for months, family members certainly didn’t start a fight at the funeral where accusations flew, and no one had been suspiciously written into or out of the will.

Of course that doesn’t make for an interesting story.

Especially when the idea of a body sitting in a house is the exact sort of thing children love to talk about to terrify themselves.

By the spring the school children had made up a story about a disowned son who had returned for revenge and how the police had searched for weeks and not been able to find all of the body. How their parents yelled at them to stop making up stories only added to the thrill of telling them.

And eventually those children grew up and the exact details were forgotten. Wilma became Esther, somehow, a name whose origin will be forever unknown, and then a Wilson to fit the story of the criminal son, and everyone knew that the house had been haunted from the very start.

They talked about how their parents had told them about lightning striking it when it was still a frame, two carpenters inflicting ghastly, maybe even fatal, injuries on themselves while building it, and how before that, right as the foundation was being poured, a little boy when missing and how he’d last been seen playing around the construction site.

And maybe some of those stories were vaguely recalled cautionary tales, based on faintly remembered stories of their parents’ youth that they decided were about the house.

Because that was how stories grew, and it was a wonderful story to tell on windy days when the leaves start turning colors and the nights start getting longer. Imagine, a haunted house on your own street, what a story to tell to the children!

They agreed that there were times when you could see the shadow of an old woman moving around behind the curtains at night, or hear the laughter of a little boy when there were no children to be seen.

Never mind that the family that had bought the house from Wilma’s children, since none of them wanted it, had twin boys and an elderly aunt who frequently visited to spend time with them by the lake.

One of the boys did get sick for a week one spring and have some of the most awful fever dreams, a wretched looking old woman, bleeding from her hands and eyes, holding him pinned to the bed, and a tall dark man with a big, shiny saw standing in the corner, smiling at him with teeth that gleamed the same silver as the blade.

They were just dreams though, and the boy got better.

But to him and his friends they were proof that the house was haunted. His brother even agreed with him in time, adding that there was a little boy, maybe a year younger than them, that he sometimes saw in the basement.

As is the nature of childhood memories they grew more and more real as the boys grew older and they were both willing to swear that the boy and man and old woman were real, that they’d both seen them on multiple occasions.

The story was helped by the strange bones they dug up in the back yard one summer while playing with their friends. Just cow bones, but brown and crumbly with age, they were the perfect thing to be terrified of on an otherwise mundane summer.

Bones buried behind a haunted house! How terrifying!

They grew up and moved away and didn’t move back, though they sometimes returned for holidays and the pyracantha along the side of the house had grown quite tall, enough so to tap on the window when the wind blew and remind them that they’d grown up in a haunted house.

In time their aging parents decided that the house was too much for just the two of them and they sold it and moved away.

The house sat vacant for a long while, not because anyone was afraid of it, but because it _was_ a rather large house, more than any of the people who looked at it were willing to take on.

A window did get broken one fall and the police did come to look, just to be sure.

All they found was a dead raccoon that must have gotten in through the chimney.

But because it was a haunted house the children in the neighborhood, remembering the stories their parents had told them, made stories of their own. Of séances and midnight rituals, animal sacrifices and a homeless man being found frozen dead in the basement.

Eventually a man purchased the house, laughed at the stories about it being haunted and set about fixing it up.

Less than a year later his ailing mother’s health took a turn for the worse and he moved to be closer to help his father take care of her.

That was when the possibility of the house being cursed was first brought up.

After all when it was being built hadn’t two carpenters died when the place was struck by lightning on a clear day?

And hadn’t bones been found buried in the backyard?

Possibly the bones of the mysterious, vanished Esther Wilson?

The man tried to maintain the house, but it was a drain of time and money and eventually he gave it to his sister for a pittance as part of an effort to help her out and the legend of the house grew.

Such a nice house in such a nice neighborhood, it should have sold for far more, but the owner was hardly able to give it away.

The sister was married to a disreputable man and, focused on their own troubles, the two of them let the house fall into disrepair.

They fought frequently, fights where the neighbors could hear the shouting and things being thrown.

But it made sense, _didn’t it_?

The house was haunted and who could live happily in a place like _that_ for long?

The poor young couple, unable to afford anything better, safer, _saner_. They’d moved into the place knowing full well what it was and now they were suffering for it.

Because that fit the narrative better than the two of them just being unpleasant people.

They lived there unhappily for several more years until the husband up and left one night without warning.

Driven away by the house, the neighbors claimed, never mind that he had been having an affair with a woman for quite some time prior to that, and she vanished the exact same night.

The woman spent another two years in the house before she met another, better man, and the two of them moved away.

The house was left empty, a for sale sign in the yard and the people in the town talked about how it would probably stay that way for a long time.

It was a bad place they agreed.

A haunted place.

And given how long that had been said about it, how every mystery and tragedy associated with it, no matter how small, real or imagines, was attributed to that, was it any wonder that the house itself started to believe the stories?

Though could it be blamed if the ghosts it dreamed were pleasant ones?

The rope dangling from the old oak tree, once part of a swing, moved even when there wasn’t a breeze as though a little boy were playing there. Sometimes, the curtains, drawn behind closed windows, occasionally moved as the shadow of an old woman walked through the empty rooms, down to the kitchen where the smell of baking soon drifted through the neighborhood.

For if a house could be haunted then why couldn’t it dream as well?

Because what are ghosts if not dreams of a place?

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to try a different take on the idea off how houses become haunted. I really hope that you enjoyed it.


End file.
